But you could
by madkin
Summary: "You could fall in love with Tori Vega." / Beck finally understands why Tori gets under Jade's skin.


_A/N: Hey everyone. Just got some random inspiration for this and wanted to share. Enjoy!_

* * *

"I can't believe you would do this!" Initially, Jade wanted to cut everything in this stupid, small RV, but then she realized half the things destroyed would be her own.

"Do what? Hang out with a friend?" He spat. He doesn't understand why Tori bothers her so much. Why she can get under Jade's skin and make her doubt everything: her talent, her friends, him, them.

"Don't act like that's all this was. I'm not stupid!"

"I didn't do anything wrong! I'm allowed to have friends."

"Not ones you've kissed!"

"So I can't hang out with Cat?" When they were 14, right after they started dating, he'd kissed Cat in a game of spin the bottle. Jade was sitting right there and they weren't exclusive, but he felt like shit after. Sometimes he thinks that it bothered him more than it bothered Jade.

"That's different."

Beck chuckles, but it has an edge to it. "How? Tell me what makes it so fucking different?"

"You'd never fall in love with Cat!"

There's silence. He hates when she does this. When she questions his feelings for her.

"You're doing this just to piss me off, right? You know I hate when you do this. What reaction are you looking for Jade? Do you want me to tell you that I love you? Because I will. I do." He thinks she's going to start yelling again, but then she takes a deep breath and he sees her deflate.

"I know you better than anyone, right?"

He doesn't understand where she's going with this. Doesn't understand how this could possibly relate back to Tori. "Right."

"So I'm the most qualified person to be able to look at someone and know you could fall in love with them, right?"

Beck pauses. He doesn't want to respond. It feels like a trick question. Because she's right. She would know. But admitting to himself, and to her, that he could love someone else feels like cheating.

"Right?" There's an edge to her tone now, so Beck knows that there was a part of her that was hoping she was wrong. And he destroyed that by not answering.

"Right," he chokes out. She gets jealous a lot and Beck knows it's because she's afraid to lose him. And he knows that he's a natural flirt, but he's never felt like he was cheating like he was betraying their relationship and the trust she had in him. Until now. And the guilt was consuming. How could anyone ever do this to someone they love?

"You could fall in love with Tori Vega."

"I love you. I'm in love with you." It's all he can think to say. Because he is, unquestionably and undoubtedly, in love with her.

"But you could be in love with her too."

"But I'm not. I promise I'm not."

"But you could! And I don't know how to just sit there and watch you laugh with her and tell stories and do funny Slap videos knowing that you could love her the way you love me." She pauses. She's giving him a chance. A chance to do what, he doesn't know. He can't fix this. "So no, you can't just go to her house and hang out with her alone, at night, having fun while I'm sitting somewhere obsessing over the possibility that you could be falling in love with her right at that moment and there's nothing I could do about it. Or worse that I would never even know, that I'd be sitting at lunch with you one day and she would walk up and you'd give her _my_ smile." Her voice breaks, "Because it makes me sick to my stomach. I can't handle that, okay? I just can't." It makes him sick to his stomach too."You can't expect me to just-"

"Okay."

"What?"

"Okay. I won't hang out with her alone. And I will always tell you when she'll be at a group thing and you won't be." Because he doesn't want to fall in love with Tori.

"Really?" She looks suspicious, like maybe he's lying to her. He thinks he might throw up.

"I love you. And I don't want to love anyone else. Even if I could, I don't want to. So yes, really. Okay?"

Jade hesitates. "Okay."

"Come here." He holds his arms out and she wraps her arms around his torso. He can feel her shaking. Or maybe that's him. He can't tell. "I want you. I love you. I'm in love with you. And that's how I want it to stay, okay?" He can feel her nod against him. "Okay," he repeats.

* * *

Beck's leaning against Jade's locker, pretending not to notice the scissors against his back, with his arms wrapped around Jade's waist and her arms around his neck. "I'll see you after rehearsal?" He murmurs.

"I get out at 5pm."

"I'll be here." Beck presses a kiss against her forehead. "My place tonight?"

"Yeah, but I still have that paper to write." Her tone is stern, but there's a playful glint in her eyes.

"I'll behave myself." Jade rolls her eyes, which makes him smirk. He leans down to kiss her. "Love you."

"Yeah, yeah," Jade says as she pushes herself away from him. She leans down to pick up her backpack sitting on the floor beside them. "I'll see you at 5. And don't be late!"

"Never!" Beck watches her walk away with a small smile on his face.

"Hi!" Beck rips his eyes away from where Jade was and sees Tori standing next to him. He glances back to where Jade had been a few moments ago.

"Hey."

"So why are you here so late?"

Beck tells himself to relax. There's nothing wrong with talking to Tori for a few minutes after school. "Jade has rehearsal."

"Oh. Well, do you want to hang out? I'm waiting for Trina to get out of this weird workshop thing." Beck hesitates, not sure how to decline, but he takes too long. "Or not. I mean if you have something else you have to do."

"No, that's not it."

Tori rolls her eyes. "Let me guess, Jade has forbidden you from hanging out with me. She's so controlling-"

"It's not like that." Tori's assumption irks him. Because, technically, yes, Jade was the reason he didn't want to hang out, but it wasn't what Tori was implying. Jade hadn't forbidden anything.

Tori rolls her eyes. "Please. You don't have to cover for her. Jade's hated me since the moment I got here. Ever since…" Tori trails off, leaving them in an uncomfortable silence.

Beck had never understood why Jade was so upset over his stage kiss with Tori. He got that it wasn't a necessary stage kiss, that he should have said no. He'd even apologized to Jade for it, but he never understood.

"We kissed?" But as he thinks about it now, he thinks he gets it. He gets that Jade saw this new girl and watched their interactions over the course of her first day and saw… something. He's still not quite sure what Jade sees, but he gets, now, that it happened quickly. That he'd given Jade's gut feeling actual ground to stand on when he kissed Tori.

"Yeah." Tori shifts her weight from one foot to the other. "We never really talked about that, huh?"

"There's nothing to talk about."

Tori starts playing with her fingers. "Are you sure?"

"I love Jade. You know that." Beck leans further against Jade's locker, trying to put more space between them.

"I know. I didn't mean…"

"What did you mean then?" His voice sounds harsher than he meant it to, but his conversation with Jade is still fresh. Thinking about it still makes him sick and he doesn't know if that will ever go away. He hopes it doesn't.

Tori takes a deep breath before making eye contact with him. This isn't a conversation she thought they would ever have. At least, not while he was still with Jade. "I just… I mean… "

Beck waits for her to start again. He doesn't want to ruin a friendship or the group dynamic by assuming that she's hitting on him or undermining his relationship with Jade.

"I just… thought that maybe you felt something, you know, when we kissed." Tori somehow manages to maintain eye contact with him as she speaks despite how nervous she looks.

Beck doesn't know what to say. He didn't fall in love with her because of that kiss. He didn't love Jade any less after the kiss. He didn't want to be with Tori. But he can't say that he felt nothing. If he'd been single, if he'd never known Jade existed, he probably would have asked Tori out after class that day. And that's what Jade saw, what she knew before even he did.

"I felt something-" Tori's eyes light up a little, so Beck starts talking faster."-but I don't want to give you the wrong impression. I'm in love with Jade. I'm with Jade. And I'm not breaking up with her. I know that we might have given you the impression that we break up a lot or that we aren't serious, but we are. And that was the first time we've ever broken up and it was more complicated than it looked and I don't want it to ever happen again."

Tori takes a minute to process his words. She doesn't think she's ever heard him say so much at one time. "Okay, wow."

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to hurt your feelings or anything. I just… Jade is the most important person in my life and I can't jeopardize that. I can't lose her because of one kiss."

"So you really love her then."

Beck's not sure Tori has ever really believed him until now. He thinks a part of her has always thought that Jade was manipulating him into staying in some unhappy relationship. "She's my best friend. If we ever broke up, I'd always be reaching for a part of me that wasn't there anymore. So we can't hang out alone anymore. I'll always be your friend and you can ask me for help with Trina's birthday week or rehearsing lines and we'll hang out with the group, but-"

"But not alone." Tori exhales as she tries to understand where he's coming from.

"And that's not Jade's decision. It's mine. I can't risk my relationship that way. I refuse to."

Tori nods quickly, trying to get him to stop talking. She doesn't think she can listen to another speech about how important Jade is and how much he loves her. Once was enough for her. "You don't have to keep going. I understand."

Beck takes a deep breath. "Okay. So I'm just going to go wait for Jade to get out of rehearsal."

Tori smiles brightly, too brightly. 'Yeah, of course. I'll see you tomorrow."

Beck nods. He can see that she's upset, maybe hurt even. He wants to make her feel better, but he knows that will only make it worse. He can't be that person for her, not about this. He can't lose his best friend.


End file.
